ANALYSIS OF MOLECULAR VARIANCE

As the name suggests Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) is a method for studying molecular variation within a species.

Electrophoresis, one of the most widely used methods for studying the structure of DNA, produces data of the form of 0s and 1s where 1 denotes the presence of a band and zero its absence, e.g.

Sample	Band
A	0101...
B	1000...
C	0110...

AMOVA works on such data to create a distance matrix between samples in order to measure the genetic structure of the population from which the samples are drawn. In statistical terms, AMOVA is a testing procedure based on permutational analysis and involves few assumptions about the statistical properties of the data.

Author : G.R.Bishop , Statistics Department, University of Adelaide © 1996